Amasty, Bronze Sponsor MM17ES

Amasty, Bronze Sponsor MM17ES

We interview Valeriya Shautsova, Head of QA department at Amasty.

With 5+ years of experience in testing, a researcher degree in science, and strong teaching skills obtained while working at a training center, Valeriya is Amasty’s quality evangelist. In her free time, Valeriya is into fashion design. What’s more, she takes an active part in SmartClubBelarus life.

Valeriya, What does Amasty offer?

We know 200+ ways of making your business stronger. For 8 years, we’ve been devotedly improving Magento functionality, and we’re good at it. That’s how more than 200 Magento extensions were born. We know your needs and offer quality tools to cover them. Get everything you want for your store in one place – we have the widest range of extensions on the market. Full cross-product compatibility provides a flawless experience for you and your customers, no matter which extensions you choose.

As a Bronze sponsor of MM17ES, What do you think about the event? Any Points to highlight? Why would you repeat next year?

It was a pleasure and an honor to sponsor the event!

I think that the conference was of great quality, which is in general a tradition for Meet Magento events. I especially liked the fact that there were three tracks so that you could choose the topics you’re most interested in. As a listener and as a speaker, I believe this is beneficial because you’re getting a more focused and engaged audience for each speech of the track.

What do you think about the future of the e-commerce sector?

I believe what we’re seeing now is just the tips of the iceberg. Many technology and Internet trends come and go, but each year e-commerce is showing growth all over the world and in separate countries as well, despite of all the economical and political difficulties in various regions. This stable growth is the sign of a powerful business movement going on there. And we’re excited and honored to be a part of this movement and to help thousands of e-commerce companies around the world grow and evolve.

Does your company have some improvements or new opportunities next year?

It certainly does. We will continue creating more quality Magento 2 extensions, as well us updating and supporting previously created Magento 1 and Magento 2 modules.

What is more, we have some plans on improving our own website to make choosing Magento extensions even more convenient, both with new opportunities for our customers as well. And the most exciting plans, I’m afraid, we’re yet to announce =)

Amasty explain to us how artificial intelligence will help your e-commerce business in the near future

Valeriya Shautsova, Head of QA department al Amasty

The latest predictions on the global automation market revenue in 2016 – 2020 demonstrates the artificial intelligence segment is supposed to double the income by 2020:

In line with the MIT SMR business-management research, only 19% of companies see the prospects of artificial intelligence and 85% of those believe AI is the main competitive advantage of a 21st-century company.

Among the e-commerce companies who have already implemented AI are Netflix, Knorr, Wayblazer, Under Armour, USAA, Amazon, others. Probably, at this point the e-commerce giants simply can’t do without the technologies. Let’s see what are the main areas of AI implementation used in e-commerce. Perhaps, some of them will be applied by you tomorrow.

ML for monitoring financial transactions

It is obvious that fraudsters and hackers are improving their attacking methods, but protection algorithms remains relevant as well because it is self-learning. PayPal uses ML to monitor suspicious transactions. An average share of fraudulent transactions in financial sphere is 1.32% where PayPal cut it to 0.32%.

It may seem to be just one percent, but given the volume of the transactions, the technology saves millions of dollars.

AI for voice recognition

Amazon is known to use AI in a number of products such as Alexa for Amazon’s Echo. Alexa is a virtual assistant managed by voice. Amazon’s Echo allows its owners to choose and order items by just talking to the virtual assistant. Although the Echo’s shopping technology is rather limited at the moment, we can see this as a start to drastic shopping workflow changes in the next five years, given that Echo’s an affordable and popular solution in the US right now.

Delivery drones for faster shipping

Delivery drones by Amazon Prime Air are announced to deliver packages up to 5 pounds in 30 or fewer minutes.

While the technology used for the delivery drones is held in confidence, we can suppose that, for example, they might use machine learning and AL for building routes, improving machine vision and correcting trajectories based on the wind speed and direction, and such.

A new delivery paradigm is being built within the walls of Amazon – and as we can see, it’s one of the many touch points of AL and business inside the company.

Dynamic Ads for personalized content

Thousands of digital marketing companies use Dynamic Ads offered by popular social nets and third-party platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and others. The technology works on gathering and analyzing the information from users: cookies, tracking data, time of day, a day of week/month, geolocation and other metadata to ‘show’ a visitor the goods he/she looks for. Having figured out your gender, age, brand preferences, the technology will offer the products you’d rather buy but will hardly find on your own.

As all the innovative things happening out there, this domain is beneficial not only for merchants, which will be able to sell more, but also for customers, because they are given the products that perfectly meet their requirements.

In the next years, these technologies will evolve and produce even more targeted and personalized product suggestions and ads.

Dynamic Pricing for boost in revenue

Neural nets are used for dynamic pricing to maximize merchant’s revenue by automatically calculating a competitive price for a product.

Even now, the technology is widely applied by hotels and airlines where customer’s geolocation, previous purchases, device and other parameters are essential factors of price generation. In the next decade, it is expected to enter other markets as well.

AI for voice search

The technology is presupposed to receive and examine visitors voice query. E.g.: ‘I’m looking for a smartphone on Android with a full-frame camera and long battery life’. Having analyzed the demands, the clever search system will deliver a personalized result to a customer. Besides, if the system gets too little information for results delivery it can ask pointers that a customer hasn’t thought about. E.g.: ‘How important is the size of a smartphone for you?’.

Neural nets are being successfully implemented in e-commerce. Today they help hundreds of customers to do shopping easier and faster. During the process of intercommunication with customers, the system learns to react to the emotions with conversation and meet different commercial needs.

Final word

In 2018 big data is supposed to be a new currency. The number of products enlarges drastically, and customers get lost in all the diversity, where they need help with making shopping decisions.

AI is the solution that works in this direction, because manual search and simple Google queries are not enough to pick the right product anymore, and traditional e-commerce experience needs to evolve to satisfy the changing customer requests.

But what will happen when AI meets VR?

This isn’t about the kind of conversion rates that traditional retailers strive for. Such immersive technologies as AI and VR will change the whole idea of e-commerce. A new sensory shopping experience can be tried right now in the first eBay virtual reality department store.